I've been running Ubuntu 18.04 for a little while on my main desktop computer. I really haven't had any issues with it except for the constant running out of space on the SSD when ripping Blu-ray media (Ubuntu was installed on a 120GB SSD). Here are the steps I've taken so far after installing Ubuntu 16.04:

Update the system

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

I then plugged back in my 1TB hard drive. Windows 10 lives on that drive. I booted Ubuntu and updated grub so it would recognize the Windows partitions on the drive:

One of the steps in our refurbishing process at The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project involves testing the CMOS battery inside each desktop PC we refurbish. Testing the CMOS battery is a relatively simple process and you can do it a number of ways. The simplest is with a cheap battery tester. You can sometimes find these at dollar or hardware stores. But battery testers can't be found everywhere so the next simplest method is with a multimeter.

While I've been using Windows 10 lately to develop Fasteroids, almost everything else I do is on Linux, so I'm used to using Linux tools to get different jobs done, and it's what I go to when I have a problem and need some software to solve it. This week one of our refurbishing friends asked us to build him an older (Core 2 Duo)-based Windows 10 system that he could put his Hauppauge PVR-150 TV tuner card in. This wasn't a big deal, although the PVR-150 is an older card it still seems to be supported by Windows 10 (we needed to do an online driver update, but Windows 10 found the driver).

I've been working on Fasteroids on several fronts over the past few days (seemingly not making progress on a couple of those fronts - Ubuntu and MacOS X ports, but they're coming, even if it takes me awhile to figure out). I did make some progress on small things:

The last couple of weeks I've made some small strides with Fasteroids. There were a number of bugs I needed to fix that got fixed and some small things I wanted to add that finally got added. There's a few more things I want to finish before unleashing Fasteroids on the world.

A little more progress this morning on Fasteroids. One of the things I wasn't sure of was whether irandom(1) was evaluating properly. I discovered it was evaluating properly, what wasn't working was the UFO coming in from the right and moving to the left. I still haven't figured out why this isn't happening, but I figured out the evaluation by inserting a room_goto(room_howtoplay) to re-direct the right to left movement so that it just jumps to the game instructions room.

I'd hoped by now to be a lot further along than I am in the development of Fasteroids. At this point I'm stuck solving some issues surrounding the UFOs that spawn in Fasteroids. I also wasn't particularly pleased with how the UFO looked. I modelled the original UFO after a print I saw, the print looked neat, but my implementation of it just didn't look right to me. I came up with a new sprite for the UFO (pictured below). It's also the first time I've used one of the new tools I bought, the Aseprite sprite creator.

Lately I've been feeling the need to upgrade the boot SSD in my home workstation. The SSD in question, an 120GB Samsung SSD 750, has been a great drive, but it's simply become too small for my needs. I've switched things up the past few years. My workstation's current disk configuration is as follows:

Since revising the web site I haven't been posting very frequently about Fasteroids. This post is just to let everyone know that I am working on Fasteroids. Much of what I've been working on is fixing little issues, but I also have a few "features" on tap for the future. To start with Fasteroids now has the beginnings of an enemy UFO (see screenshot). This is just the start. For the moment I'm just spawing the UFO at certain intervals. The UFO spawns at a random Y axis location but spawns either on the right or left and streams across the screen.